This open access book seeks to understand how politics is being made in a pluralistic sense, and explores how these political struggles are challenging and transforming gender, sexuality, and colonial norms. As researchers located in Sweden, a nation often cited as one of the most gender-equal and LGBTQ-tolerant nations, the contributions investigate political processes, decolonial struggles, and events beyond, nearby, and in between organizations, states, and national territories. The collection represents a variety of disciplines, and different theoretical conceptualizations of politics, feminist theory, and postcolonial and queer studies. Students and researchers with an interest of queer studies, gender studies, critical whiteness studies, and civil society studies will find this book an invaluable resource.

The legal regulation of gender and sexuality has undergone dramatic changes throughout Europe in the last 40 years and this has shaped what it means to be a European citizen. Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary research, this book uses the discourses around current European sexual politics as an entry point to interrogate how, and with what effect, the EU and its Member States harness issues of gender and sexuality to support issues of higher political importance. It takes recent and ongoing political debates and legislative changes around prostitution and sexual assault as a focus. Using four national case studies: Poland, Germany, Sweden and Italy it illuminates how the EU’s desire for increased harmonisation across the Union around gender and sexuality norms and values operates differently and with specific effects across Member States. The book’s structure provides a detailed map of how and why contemporary European sexual politics is changing, and how this contributes to establishing European norms and values in developments in law and policy around prostitution and sexual assault. By examining how and why the EU and its Member States implement their policies in these two policy areas we can begin to illuminate how contemporary European sexual politics serve some groups’ interests while marginalizing ‘Others’.

Interdisciplinary in perspective, this book explores contemporary struggles around ‘identity politics’ in Europe, offering a unique glimpse into contemporary tensions and paradoxes surrounding identities, belonging, exclusions and their deep-seated gendered, colonial and racist legacies. With a particular focus on the Nordic region, it provides insights into the ways in which people who find themselves in minoritized positions struggle against multiple injustices. Through a series of case studies documenting counter-struggles against racist, colonialist, sexist forms of discrimination and exclusion, Transforming Identities in Contemporary Europe asks how the paradigm and politics of the welfare state operate to discriminate against the most marginalized, by instating a naturalized hierarchy of human-ness. As such it will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in race, gender, colonialism and postcolonialism, citizenship and belonging. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This open access book engages with the concept of reproductive justice by exploring case studies of struggles around abortion in the context of rising anti-genderism, religious fundamentalism, and ethno-nationalism. Based on rich qualitative data offering in-depth analyses from different geographical, political and cultural contexts, the book explores how reproductive justice is understood, contested and given meaning. Chapters further develop the Black feminist concept of reproductive justice in a critical dialogue with postcolonial theory and explore the strength of transnational feminist practices. This book thus offers a fresh approach to the issue of abortion by engaging with contemporary political and cultural processes, and it expands the narrow notions of women’s rights, particularly notions of property rights over bodies, towards an analysis of the political economy of social reproduction and how it affects bodies that can be pregnant. This volume will be of interest to scholars with interests in reproductive justice, anti-gender politics, and religious fundamentalism.

This book provides the first systematic and comparative analysis of the intersections of populism and science in Europe, from the perspective of political sociology. Populism is the object of rich scholarly debate over its definition and the best way to approach its study. But until now, little attention has been paid to the relationships between populism and science. Recently, the Covid-19 crisis has exposed the contradictions in this relationship, and this book combines an analysis of the theoretical aspects of the relationship between populism and science with rigorous empirical research. The theoretical perspectives show populism as a thin-ideology, as discourse and performance, and as a political logic, consider both right-wing and left-wing populism, and focus on leaders as well as citizens. The book also offers an overview of controversies within different fields of ‘science’, including case studies on food science, climate change, vaccination, gender theory, COVID-19, and environmental issues. The book will be of interest to scholars and students of a number of social science disciplines, including political sociology, political science and political psychology.

This book explores how race, sexuality and gender are employed in political projects of belonging, whilst examining the implications for individual identity formation, in the context of Sweden.

Since its foundation as an academic field in the 1990s, critical race theory has developed enormously and has, among others, been supplemented by and (dis)integrated with critical whiteness studies. At the same time, the field has moved beyond its origins in Anglo-Saxon environments, to be taken up and re-developed in various parts of the world – leading to not only new empirical material but also new theoretical perspectives and analytical approaches. Gathering these new and global perspectives, this book presents a much-needed collection of the various forms, sophisticated theoretical developments and nuanced analyses that the field of critical race and whiteness theories and studies offers today. Organized around the themes of emotions, technologies, consumption, institutions, crisis, identities and on the margin, this presentation of critical race and whiteness theories and studies in its true interdisciplinary and international form provides the latest empirical and theoretical research, as well as new analytical approaches. Illustrating the strength of the field and embodying its future research directions, The Routledge International Handbook of New Critical Race and Whiteness Studies will appeal to scholars across the social sciences and humanities with interests in race and whiteness.